There might not have been a spreading chestnut tree such as the one that shaded Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's master of the bellows, but the village blacksmith has been an institution in Barnstable village for nearly two hundred years. For the past one hundred or so, the tradition has been in the strong and callused hands of James Otis Ellis's family.

Be it a fi replace andiron that needed repairing, or a clam rake, eel fork, or simple hinge to be manufactured, for decades the Northside residents sought out the services of Jim, his father Otis, or his uncle Howard at the rustic shed that held their forge.

Later this spring a new verse of the fi re and forge epic will begin when Ellis opens his relocated "smithy" just up the street on the grounds of the U.S. Coast Guard Museum at the Trayser Museum.

"It was almost another case of a piece of history just going away," said Ellis, who has run the operation since 1978, when an injury to his legs forced him to retire. "It's kinda ironic; my father took over the shop from my uncle in 1959, after he was injured in a crane accident. It's been accidents that have kept our family in the business."

The roots of blacksmithing in Ellis's family began when his uncle, Howard Burris, started working with smithy Fred Kent in 1908. "In those days. every village had a blacksmith," said Ellis. "He was just about the most important person in town. When something broke, he fixed it. If something needed to be invented to make something work better, they invented it. Every house in town had something worked on by the blacksmith."

The building Ellis has been blacksmithing in for all these years has made its rounds through the village over the years. It started out behind the village schoolhouse on top of Lothrop's Hill, where it held the village's horsedrawn hearse. In the middle of the twentieth century it was moved to land behind the Barnstable News store, and then around 1980 to its present location behind the Barnstable Tavern.

"It has really fallen into disrepair," said Ellis. "It was getting to the point where was uncomfortable to even be in there."

There was an attempt to have the 200-year-old structure moved again and repaired, but that never came to fruititon. "It would just about have to be taken down piece by piece and put back together," Ellis said. "We thought up at the museum would have been a good place. But the current owner didn't have the interest."

Out of necessity, Ellis moved a part of his operation into his garage attached to his house directly across the street from the Barnstable Superior Court House and the statute of James Otis, his namesake. Ellis and his wife Jean take their part in the history of their community very seriously, keeping scrapbooks on many subjects related to the village. On holidays, they invite residents into their home, which itself has the look and feel of a museum.

"It still didn't feel right, and there was a lot of equipment that I couldn't bring into the garage," said Ellis, who thought that it might be time put out the flame in his forge for good.

It was then that officials of the Trayser inquired if he would think about moving his operation to their location. "I wasn't sure, but after giving it some thought, it started to sound pretty goodm" he said. Ellis spent some time thinking what his predecessors might have thought of the idea.

"I kinda got a couple of signs one day," he said. "I was looking for a certain matching piece of iron, and all of a sudden I found it where I thought I had looked before. I then saw a green reflection coming through one of the windows in the old shed, and I chuckled that maybe my dad and uncle were giving the green light about relocating. I soon came to terms that keeping on the family tradition was more important than worrying about keeping it at the same location."

The Ellises moved everything up to the new site, which ironically is just across the street where the blacksmith shop was more than a hundred years ago.

"Everything about the business is heavy," the smithy said. "Every piece seemed to weigh 200 pounds, but we have finally got it all there." Besides doing some small jobs here and there, Ellis plans on putting on blacksmith demonstrations for visitors to the museum during the summer.

"It's a shame we had to close the old shop, but I guess there is a time and place for everything," he said. And luckily for Barnstable village, the time to lose one of its institutions isn't quite now.